Chapter 1 - Philosophical Investigations §§1–693: an elementary exposition

Summary

THE ‘METHOD OF §2’

In the Philosophical Investigations, topics are repeatedly introduced in the following way.

Stage 1: A brief statement of a philosophical position that Wittgenstein opposes, which usually emerges out of an exchange with another voice. Thus, in §1, we are presented with a conception of meaning that arises out of Wittgenstein's reading of a passage from Augustine's Confessions:

Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.

(§1b)

Stage 2: The description of a quite specific set of circumstances in which that position is appropriate:

That philosophical concept of meaning has its place in a primitive idea of the way language functions. But one can also say that it is the idea of a language more primitive than ours.

Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right.

(§2)

In §2 of the Philosophical Investigations, the passage just quoted leads in to the famous story of ‘Wittgenstein's builders’, a tribe who only have four words, each of which is used by a builder to instruct his assistant to bring one of four kinds of building blocks.

Stage 3: The deflationary observation that the circumstances in question are quite limited, and that once we move beyond them, the position becomes inappropriate:

Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication; only not everything that we call language is this system. And one has to say this in many cases where the question arises: ‘Is this an appropriate description or not?’ The answer is: ‘Yes, it is appropriate, but only for this narrowly circumscribed region, not for the whole of what you were claiming to describe.’

(§3a)